Last week, this newspaper published an interesting query as to when the Ethiopian Prime Minister would leave the political scene. Interestingly enough and with his usual bent irony, the prime minister reformulated the question in a manner that revealed a very important truth of Ethiopian politics. “As to when you expect to be free of me,” the PM was quoted as saying, “I will have to keep you guessing”.
 

The PM is apparently admitting that he is the maker and breaker of things in this country or that he has a gut feeling that people in this country want to get rid of him. I think this is the meaning of the code words “to be free of me”.
 

I hope the Prime Minister would not deny that over the last 20 or 14 years he has evolved from the leader of a ragtag guerrilla army and a loose coalition he put together under the name of EPRDF in order to help him seize power nationally, into the strongman of the biggest nation in East Africa. 
 

The PM undoubtedly wields immense power. He is the head of the TPLF, the ruling party in his Tigrayan constituency and within the coalition known as the EPRDF or the ruling party nationally. He is the chairman of the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray (MLLT), another dinosaur organization that has apparently buried its head in the sand and feigning non-existence but waiting an opportune moment to come into life. Since the MLLT is not officially disbanded we can assume that it has only assumed low profile.
 

The PM is also commander-in-chief of the armed forces, which is the most important position he has. Because democratic institutions are not developed in Ethiopia, do not enjoy independence from one another, or a system of check and balances is not in place, the chief executive has indirect influence, through the web of connections his party has carefully nurtured over the years, on the legislature and the justice system that is mainly run by ruling party cadres whose loyalty to the system based on ethnic affiliation rather than professional competence, is quite undisputable.  
 

The PM holds undisputed authority over the regional minions he manipulates at will in order to guarantee the hegemony of his core organization. Theoretically or constitutionally, the regional councils have the power to elect their leaders but in practice things are decided at the centre and mainly within the EPRDF core leadership with the PM as the king maker.
 

The PM has left the question of political succession relatively unclear in the Ethiopian constitution. Ethiopia has a prime ministerial political system and the party that wins a majority of votes in a national election rules the country for a five-year term. The Ethiopian constitution does not say anything about how many times a party should stay in power even if it wins elections. It does not limit the terms in office of a party and by implication that of the head of the majority party who becomes the Prime Minister. I think this is a very serious lacuna, deliberately left in the constitution. This point did not attract sufficient attention in national political discourse but the PM is apparently poised to exploit this deliberate gap in the constitution to his advantage.
 

My own guess is that Prime Minister Meles might not be ready to quit until at least 2010 or 2015 and I know that this is going to anger many Ethiopians. I have nevertheless objective grounds to base my assumptions on. The ruling party has barely escaped defeat in the May 2005 elections as soon as it tried to organize a free election. I do not think that it will try to repeat this experience in 2010 because it would represent a threat to its continued domination of the Ethiopian polity.

Had PM Meles had a liberal agenda, he would have started by working for national reconciliation, pluralism, the opening up of the political space and tolerance of dissent rather than the repression of the opposition and the stifling of the independent press. Nowadays, rallies, demonstrations and political gatherings are effectively banned in Ethiopia while press freedom is deliberately stifled. The regime is trying to base its legitimacy on what it calls economic growth but this would not help it overcome its authoritarian political nature. All this might be indicative that the PM is not ready to quit the scene anytime soon although talk of a post-Meles Ethiopia might start now.